In his first term, President Obama was criticized for trash-talking the 1-percenters while enjoying the aristocracy of Martha’s Vineyard and the nation’s most exclusive golf courses.

Obama never quite squared his accusations that “millionaires and billionaires” had not paid their fair share with his own obvious enjoyment of the perks of “corporate jet owners,” “fat cat bankers,” and Las Vegas junketeers

Now, that paradox has continued right off the bat in the second term. In the State of the Union, Obama once more went after “the few” and “the wealthiest and the most powerful,” whom he blasted as the “well-off and the well-connected” and the “billionaires with high-powered accountants.”Like clockwork, the president then jetted to West Palm Beach for yet another golfing vacation at one of the nation’s priciest courses, replete with lessons from a $1,000-an-hour golf pro to improve the presidential putting.

The rest of the first family jetted off on their own skiing vacation to elite Aspen, Colo., where nobody accepts that at some point they’ve already “made enough money.” Meanwhile, below the stratosphere, unemployment rose to 7.9 percent for January — the 49th consecutive month it has been 7.8 percent or higher. The economy shrank in the last quarter of 2012, gas is back to almost $4 a gallon, and the government continues to borrow almost $4 billion a day.

Today, lots of liberal grandees attack the rich and yet do their best to act and live just like them.

Take financial speculator and leftist billionaire George Soros, who is back in the news. Soros is able to fund several progressive think tanks that go after the 1 percent because he is the most successful financial buccaneer of the age — notorious as “the man who broke the Bank of England” and who was convicted of insider trading in France. The Soros family investment firm’s most recent speculating coup was betting against the Japanese yen. That made Soros $1.2 billion in just three months — enough capitalist lucre to keep funding Media Matters and other attack-dog progressive groups for years to come.

Facebook co-founder and Obama campaign organizer Chris Hughes just bought The New Republic and has rebranded the magazine as an unapologetic progressive megaphone.

How odd that hip Facebook just confessed that it paid no federal or California State income taxes for 2012 on its $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits from its U.S. operations alone. Odder still, Facebook will probably receive a federal-tax refund of about $429 million. Apparently Facebook’s “well connected” found some “high-powered accountants” to write off their stock options as a business expense.

Perhaps treasury-secretary-designate Jack Lew should have a look at Facebook’s tax contortions. He should be familiar with the big-money paper trail, given that Lew himself took a nearly $1 million bonus from Citigroup after it had received billions of dollars in federal funds to cover its gargantuan losses.

Lew, like his tax-dodging predecessor, Timothy Geithner, has a propensity for doing just the opposite of what the president used to preach against. Obama, remember, warned Wall Streeters not to take bonuses after their failing companies received federal money.

Obama also derided dubious Cayman Islands tax shelters. Yet he apparently forgot to tell that to Lew, who invested in a fund registered to the same Potemkin Cayman Islands building that Obama had used as a campaign prop to bash the 1-percenters.

One of the nation’s best-known class warriors is former U.S. representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Chicago, who for years has damned the wealthy for their ill-gotten gains. He is expected to plead guilty to fraud charges after he and his wife allegedly siphoned off $750,000 from their campaign accounts to pay for an assortment of 1-percenter extravagances such as a $43,000 Rolex watch.

Today’s leftists like the high life as much as their demonized conservative rivals do. The more they damn the bad “millionaires and billionaires,” apparently the less guilt they feel about living it up in Palm Beach or Aspen — paying no taxes, offshoring their profits, or wearing Rolex watches.

The vast growth of the federal government has splashed so much big money around New York and Washington that even muckraking progressives can’t resist. Loud redistributionist rhetoric offers the necessary vaccination shot that makes privileged leftists immune from any criticism — or guilt — over indulging in tax avoidance, billion-dollar speculation, or aristocratic tastes.

George Whorewell long ago noticed the same thing: In Animal Farm the pig elite loudly damned reactionary humans even as they sought to copy them by walking on two legs.

Obama also derided dubious Cayman Islands tax shelters. Yet he apparently forgot to tell that to Lew, who invested in a fund registered to the same Potemkin Cayman Islands building that Obama had used as a campaign prop to bash the 1-percenters.

The Democratic Party is the party of hypocrisy.........they are the party of racism, the megarich, the segragationists, the bankers, and so on and so forth. They decry racism but live within exclusive gated communities telling the rest of us plebes how to live our lives. The richest politicians on Capitol Hill are overwhelmingly Democrats, holding 7 of the top 10 spots.

Of course the resident Obama bots devoid of any individual personality will show up here.

Obama has never criticized anyone for being wealthy or enjoying the nice things that wealth provides

I know that right wingers would like to conflate criticism of tax dodging with the obvious luxuries that come with wealth but that's just another typical Republican straw man argument (i.e replace the real criticism with a fake criticism and then argue against the fake criticism and pretend you're addressing the original argument)

Also, Obama has no way of knowing where all his donors invest their money or preventing them from doing so

that's just another hollow argument to divert attention from the real criticism of tax dodging by the uber rich

Obama has never criticized anyone for being wealthy or enjoying the nice things that wealth provides

I know that right wingers would like to conflate criticism of tax dodging with the obvious luxuries that come with wealth but that's just another typical Republican straw man argument (i.e replace the real criticism with a fake criticism and then argue against the fake criticism and pretend you're addressing the original argument)

Also, Obama has no way of knowing where all his donors invest their money or preventing them from doing so

that's just another hollow argument to divert attention from the real criticism of tax dodging by the uber rich

tax dodging?

is that what libtards call taking advantage of loop holes?

obama hasnt criticized ppl for being wealthy, maybe not but he has tried to imply that they werent responsible for their own success. That they wouldnt have been successful without the help of the govt.

obama hasnt criticized ppl for being wealthy, maybe not but he has tried to imply that they werent responsible for their own success. That they wouldnt have been successful without the help of the govt.

nice try but swing and miss - that statement was not specifically directed at the wealthy but about everyone (himself included and even more so for people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale) and Romney said the exact same thing about people getting help along the way

nice try but swing and miss - that statement was not specifically directed at the wealthy but about everyone (himself included and even more so for people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale) and Romney said the exact same thing about people getting help along the way

Nice try but a swing and a miss while it may have been about all ppl it was directed at those who he wanted to raise taxes on or the ppl he called wealthy...

And what Romney said means what? LMFAO you libtards just can't not draw moral equivalents to other ppl to justify what your politicians do

so Romney said the exact same thing as Obama yet Obama was only talking to the wealthy

btw - this has nothing to do with what was claimed in the article in this thread

try again

I don't care what Romney said he as you would probably agree is a jack ass. His business acumen and understanding of business is something this country sorely needed and still needs but that has nothing to do with obamas views.

And yes Obamas comments were directed at the "wealthy" that's why he said them in relation to raising taxes on them...

Notice he wasn't advocating everyone chipping in and helping pay just the "wealthy"

I don't care what Romney said he as you would probably agree is a jack ass. His business acumen and understanding of business is something this country sorely needed and still needs but that has nothing to do with obamas views.

And yes Obamas comments were directed at the "wealthy" that's why he said them in relation to raising taxes on them...

Notice he wasn't advocating everyone chipping in and helping pay just the "wealthy"

of course you don't

you need to ignore what he said in order to make your non-existent point

In Year 1 of Obama, two fat cats named Michael Moore and Harvey Weinstein released a movie. Their magnum opus was "Capitalism: A Love Story". The unsubtly sarcastic point after the colon was that capitalism was an unmitigated bag of evil. And to reaffirm the faith of capitalism-haters in the evils of capitalism, here was a movie put out by a bunch of corporations owned by millionaires.

The traditional image of the anti-capitalist as a ragamuffin who dies of consumption in his garret has always been at odds with the real image of the anti-capitalist as a rich man or the son of a rich man. When Obama launched his big push for higher taxes, he enlisted as his ally none other than the richest man in the country. And when Occupy Wall Street's demographics were broken down, the courageous opponents of capitalism turned out to be the sons and daughters of the upper class.

This sort of thing isn't a surprise, it's history. Lenin's father was a nobleman. Cuba's dictator attended Castro's wedding. The man of the people is rather often stuck at the bottom of the top of the pole. The people who make revolutions are not the dispossessed, but those who are close enough to see what power really looks like, but have no hope of wielding absolute power unless they enlist the mob. They are close enough to see the throne, but not close enough to non-violently sit down in it.

That's not even the case in America. Here we instead have the bizarre spectacle of Nicholas II and Batista calling for a revolution against the petite bourgeoisie. It's a class war being waged by billionaires against people earning six figures a year. It's millionaires making movies for profit using workers to denounce the practice of making things for profit using workers.

All of this is done in the name of democracy. Just look at the Democracy Alliance, an alliance of left-wing billionaires spending huge amounts of money to win elections. What could be more democratic than that except actually paying individuals for their vote. But just as there are bad capitalist movies and good capitalist anti-capitalist movies, there are bad billionaires who use their fortunes to influence the political process and good billionaires who use their fortunes to etc...

The Koch Brothers are bad. George Soros is good. Sheldon Adelson is bad. The Sandlers are good. The good billionaires on this list have arguably done far more damage to the little people and to the political process, but good money and bad money have nothing to do with real world consequences. Good billionaires give money to the left. Bad billionaires give money to the right or just swim in giant piles of it every evening before taking a cruise on their solid gold yachts.

We are told incessantly that income inequality is a serious issue by organizations receiving millions from the holders of billions to say that. But income inequality is only a serious issue in some sectors. It's fashionable to talk about the outrageous compensation packages for CEOs in for-profit companies, but not the outrageous compensation packages for CEOs in non-profit companies.

The president of a snack food companies who uses corporate profits to cover a huge salary is an evil pig, but the president of a charity who pulls in a huge salary using donations and government grants is a humanitarian. Again, the non-profit president is arguably a worse human being than the for-profit president, but it's not about the consequences or the moral weight of the act.

Good evil CEOs work at non-profits and do nothing while chewing up public money that is taken by force from the people. Bad evil CEOs oversee the production of productions that people voluntarily buy.

Similarly the university presidents of liberal arts colleges who saddle their students with six-figure debts in exchange for useless degrees are advancing the cause of knowledge, no matter how many dirty deals they make with financial institutions. But the presidents of for-profit schools that hand out useless degrees in exchange for five-figure debts are a blight on the educational landscape. It's not just anybody who can hand out useless degrees in exchange for debt. You have to know some Latin too.

Good people support taxing the middle class and bringing in huge numbers of unskilled workers to the country to work cheaply and then tax the middle class some more to cover their social benefits. And of course they're good people. They even offer the children of the middle class a chance to go to college and rack up six figures worth of student debt that they can then use to write essays protesting income inequality.

And there's no conspiracy to see here. If you think that you might as well suspect that the Democracy Alliance wasn't really about promoting democracy, but about using giant piles of ill-gotten loot to hijack that democracy.

Ever since the birth of democracy and even before it, politics has come down to who claims to care the most for the people. There was hardly a monstrous tyrant who didn't claim that his heart bled red for the people. Usually it was the people who ended up bleeding red, but the sentiment was there. We still suffer from a surplus of humanitarians who ache for the opportunity to take power and do the will of the people. And by the will of the people, they mean their own will.

It doesn't really matter if you call it capitalism or socialism or anythingism. Power is about power and money is about money. Strip away the labels and you have a lot of powerful people trading money for power with the agenda of accumulating more of both. It doesn't really matter what you call a billionaire who makes his fortune on currency speculation trying to dictate elections or a former politician who uses his clout to promote a crisis that his investments tend to profit from.

They're the good guys, if you listen to the people concerned with income inequality, which is to say that they give piles of money to the right causes and it would be impolite for all the good guys to notice that they make even bigger piles of money bashing capitalism.

The concern trolls of income inequality tell us that the escalating gap is a crisis, but that's another distraction. The issue isn't how big the gap between you and the CEO of Sears is. The issue is how much of a challenge it is for people to make it to the middle class and stay in the middle class. And that's not a problem that can be solved by taking more money from the CEO of Sears.

Confiscating wealth may be a tempting strategy if you're a Russian peasant in 1918, but the wealth redistribution invariably applies more to the largest segments of the population because even in a country where the poor really are poor, their resources can be indefinitely confiscated, while those of the rich cannot be.

The revolution may start with the merchants, but when all the wine is drunk and all the mansions are sacked, and Lenin has sold the best paintings in the museums to Armand Hammer (another good lefty tycoon) it trickles down to the peasants who retain wealth through sheer numbers. Armand Hammer flies the paintings home and the peasants get marched off to collective farms. The income inequality problem doesn't actually get solved, but no one talks about it anymore for fear of being shot.

It's always easy to frame the problem in terms of the hoarding of capital by the wealthy, but the wealthy aren't actually hoarding their wealth. The wealthiest Americans tend to give their wealth away through various foundations. Bill Gates is spending his fortune trying to wipe out Cholera. Ted Turner has plugged it into the United Nations. David Koch had given hundreds of millions of dollars to Lincoln Center and MIT. It's not a new tradition either. The names of Carnegie and Rockefeller are all over landmarks in New York City, including libraries and theaters.

If the ladder up the classes has gotten shakier, it is doubtfully the fault of the plutocrats for being rich. The 1 percent is not a new phenomenon in the country's history, nor is the denunciation of them for being rich. Americans have had a complicated relationship with wealth for a long time and that hasn't changed. What has changed is the rise of a third factor.

It's silly to talk about the conspicuous consumption of even the most outrageous rich, when the government rips through more money in a day than every billionaire combined could possibly spend. And that spending has been driven in no small part by agitation from political organizations funded by billionaires and millionaires, sometimes out of an insistence on political philanthropy and sometimes for darker motives.

Incomes haven't become more unequal because the rich have grabbed all the money and stuffed it into a vault, but because the traditional ladder of success has been cut away and replaced with a clumsy government elevator that sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't, and requires a whole lot of maintenance. But its defenders say that elevators are modern and smooth. They may not fit many people, but it is a quick easy ride. And the people down below are told to demand that the rich make more elevators for them and then everything will be alright.

The middle class wasn't wiped out by the individual accumulation of wealth, but by the political accumulation of wealth and power. The shift from capitalism to socialism means that the poor live better than they used to, but that they have nowhere to go. And that the middle class is on the road to joining them in a society with a small upper class and a huge lower class that is somehow meant to subsidize its own government benefits. The capitalist ladder over which millions could swarm has been traded in for a socialist elevator that takes you to the top floor if you denounce capitalism often enough, but mostly never goes anywhere.

Rather than a society of aspiring merchants and builders, we instead have a society of beggars and philosopher-kings. The beggars are expected to be angry and the philosopher-kings are expected to be charitable. Eventually the philosopher-kings will expect the beggars to work for very little in exchange for that charity and the beggars will find that social justice protests don't work well against machine gun nests. Some might think that's conspiracy, but it's mostly just history. Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Obama never quite squared his accusations that “millionaires and billionaires” had not paid their fair share with his own obvious enjoyment of the perks of “corporate jet owners,” “fat cat bankers,” and Las Vegas junketeers

(1) No squaring was required: it is entirely consistent for a person to call for higher taxes on the rich while simultaneously enjoying the many privileges of wealth; in fact, since Obama certainly knew the taxes would impact his own wealth, the act is most plausibly interpreted as magnanimous (or, as being more concerned with sociotropic matters than self interest).

(2) Even if squaring was required and never achieved, it wouldn't affect the underlying argument for more progressive taxation (I don't know whether I agree with it or not). To insist otherwise is to insist that arguments are only as valid as the personalities of the people presenting them are pure, an obvious logical fallacy. That doesn't mean there is never value in pointing out hypocrisy (which Obama's actions don't count as; see (1)); rather, it means that this action is independent of evaluating arguments for specific policies.

Now, that paradox has continued right off the bat in the second term. In the State of the Union, Obama once more went after “the few” and “the wealthiest and the most powerful,” whom he blasted as the “well-off and the well-connected” and the “billionaires with high-powered accountants.”Like clockwork, the president then jetted to West Palm Beach for yet another golfing vacation at one of the nation’s priciest courses, replete with lessons from a $1,000-an-hour golf pro to improve the presidential putting.

The rest of the first family jetted off on their own skiing vacation to elite Aspen, Colo., where nobody accepts that at some point they’ve already “made enough money.”

Meanwhile, below the stratosphere, unemployment rose to 7.9 percent for January — the 49th consecutive month it has been 7.8 percent or higher.

(3) Yes, though of course the U-6 value is what's really relevant. Funnily enough, U-6 remained unchanged, and is not mentioned by this author. George, why do you think a conservative columnist who gets published at places that harped on the U-6 rate when it remained unchanged when U-3 declined (e.g., The National Review) is now using U-3 when it goes up and U-6 remains unchanged, even though U-6 is the better indicator? Any ideas?

(4) The data isn't homogeneous in projecting a bleak year: in sketching a negative image via the use of only three cherry-picked variables among hundreds, the author makes the nature of his intentions clear (namely, that they aren't to describe reality as it really is; rather, select aspects of reality are to be utilized to convey a very specific, emotional and probably partisan message).

To demonstrate that this is so, here is some countervailing data: house prices (a significant portion of consumer wealth) are up 6.8% from last year; economists project 2% growth even with sequestration and high gas prices; inflation is a mere 1.6%; home purchases are at their highest since June 2008; the construction industry has picked up ~100k jobs in the last few months; consumer confidence has risen for the first time in several months; and bank lending has increased. These are especially pertinent to the American economy since all of our previous major recoveries have been undergirded by growth in construction/housing.

2. Besides this, it isn't clear what Obama can do differently to generate more jobs; unless a clear alternative with a demonstrably superior impact on job creation is proposed, criticism of the Obama Administration's actions isn't especially relevant. Ought implies can, meaning that it isn't rational to insist that Obama ought to do a better job coaxing the American economy into generating more jobs unless it is clear that he can, a state of affairs which must be demonstrated, not merely asserted out of thin air.

4. The author mentions gas prices, apparently implying in this context that Obama can do something to reduce their price. But this implicatum is blatantly false: gas prices are determined globally, seeing as they are mostly determined by oil prices and oil is a global commodity. Here's a rudimentary analysis I posted here sometime in 2012; the specific prices aren't as relevant as the general point about price determination:

"The price of oil is the primary determinant of gas prices (65 cents for every dollar spent on gas). As of 2011, the US produces about 7.8 million bpd of oil, or 8.9% of the worldwide total. Thus, even in an utterly miraculous scenario that is humanly impossible in which a president instantly doubled US oil production -- something approving the Keystone XL pipeline and all the rest would not come remotely close to doing -- the price of oil (which, for simplicity's sake we are assuming is determined solely by supply and demand, something that isn't quite true) would shift from $90.71 a barrel to $82.64 a barrel. This in turn would mean the US average gas price would go from $3.533 a gallon to ... wait for it ... $3.33 a gallon."

(5) I'm not going to argue in defense of any of these other assholes, especially not that slimy kneegar Jackson.

I'm looking forward to your well-reasoned response(s) to this post that you yourself formulate, and not regurgitations of others' half-baked thought as in the OP. Thank you and God Bless America.

It is really ridiculous that people keep blaming Obama or any president for that matter, for the price of gas.....this assertion is one that you would think supposedly intelligent people wouldn't make...if the president of the United States controlled the price of gas or had ANY affect on gas prices we would all naturally be paying $1 a gallon....WORLD DEMAND and CARTEL manipulation causes gas prices to rise......

The reason gas prices are rising so high now is because CHINA is industrializing very quickly and they are using tremendous amounts of oil and gas.....also other nations like India, etc are using more as well....

It is really ridiculous that people keep blaming Obama or any president for that matter, for the price of gas.....this assertion is one that you would think supposedly intelligent people wouldn't make...if the president of the United States controlled the price of gas or had ANY affect on gas prices we would all naturally be paying $1 a gallon....WORLD DEMAND and CARTEL manipulation causes gas prices to rise......

The reason gas prices are rising so high now is because CHINA is industrializing very quickly and they are using tremendous amounts of oil and gas.....also other nations like India, etc are using more as well....